Virtual reality (VR) digital content, such as VR digital video or VR digital images, employs a camera system (e.g., an array of digital cameras) to capture an image scene of a physical environment. As a result, location of the camera system within the physical environment acts as a point of origin in relation to the VR digital content when viewing this content. To render the VR digital content, for instance, left and right eye panorama digital images are displayed by a VR device as stereoscopic images to support an appearance of depth. As a result, a user may “look around” at different orientations with respect to this display at the point of origin through interaction with the VR device, e.g., through rotational movement of the user's head.
However, challenges are introduced by this technique because the camera system is limited to capture of physical environment from the point of origin and thus display of this content is limited to the point of origin by conventional VR devices. Although rotational head movement of the user may be used to view different parts of the image scene correctly, for instance, repositioning (e.g., translation) of the user's head (e.g., side-to-side, up-and-down) is either not supported or results in failure to correctly update output of the VR digital content by conventional VR devices. This is because conventional VR devices do not update depth-dependent parallax correctly, in which objects in the image scene near the point of origin (e.g., the camera) exhibit a greater amount of movement than objects further away from the point of origin in the image scene. The parallax effect is a strong depth cue that is used by humans to correctly interpret real scenes. Therefore, failure to correctly reproduce the parallax depth cue by conventional VR devices compromises realism of the image scene and may even cause user nausea because movement of the user's head between different positions is not followed by what is being viewed by the user.
Conventional techniques and systems used to address this challenge involve significantly more laborious capture of image scenes and/or significantly more expensive devices. In one conventional example, a camera system is used to capture multiple images of a static scene from different positions. Thus, this conventional technique is limited to static scenes and as a result is not suitable for other types of VR digital content, such as VR digital video. In another conventional example, a light field camera is used to capture incident light of an image scene at multiple different positions. Light field cameras, however, are orders of magnitude more expensive that camera systems used to capture image scenes from a single point of origin and have limited availability.